


Stress Baking 1.0

by musiclvr1112



Series: Friends to Lovers AU [7]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Cookies, F/M, Late Night Conversations, nath is stress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-06-04
Packaged: 2019-05-18 02:10:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14843594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musiclvr1112/pseuds/musiclvr1112
Summary: Chloé wakes in the middle of the night to find Nathaniel making cookies.





	Stress Baking 1.0

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to read this as a oneshot on its own~  
> If you're reading the series, this takes place later the same night as "Angel on Fire" and before "Dancing"

Chloé awoke that night to the sound of a commotion in her kitchen. Even having been dragged directly out of REM sleep—her _very important_ REM sleep—she was immediately fully aroused, eyes and ears open and alert, ready to take in any signs of danger. She glanced at the clock. 1:03 am.

“Pollen,” she whispered, calmly nudging the sleeping kwami on the pillow next to her. “Come on.”

Without another word, she stood from her bed and grabbed her miraculous from the bedside table. She snatched her bathrobe from where it hung on her closet door, and quickly pulled it on, slipping the comb into the left side pocket. She felt Pollen nestle into the right pocket and took a deep breath, centering herself. Then she opened her door and stealthily made her way down the hallway.

It was unlike Papillon to akumatize anyone past 9 pm—the team had long suspected him to be someone who kept to a strict sleeping schedule—but maybe he was just trying to get the edge on them with this one. And Nathaniel had been in pretty rough shape earlier that day. She had never seen anyone get akumatized more than once, but she supposed it was possible, especially since the artist’s villainous day had been nearly nine years prior.

A ninja in the night, Chloé carefully poked her head out from around the corner to the kitchen and immediately sighed in relief. The red head was thankfully standing in her kitchen with his hair down flat around his head, skin its usual pale shade, and wearing nothing more than a pair of pajama pants—most notably, no mask.

If he was an akuma, he was the most underdressed one she had ever seen.

She felt Pollen vacate her pocket and turned to see the blur of yellow rush back to bed, no doubt grumbling something irritable about being woken in the first place. Chloé made a mental note to buy some of her favorite sugar sprinkles in the morning. Then another loud banging of pans snagged her attention back to the kitchen. The artist cursed under his breath as he struggled to pull two covered cookie sheets free from her cabinet without bringing down the myriad of baking tools stacked on top of them.

“Nath?” she asked, voice soft. Pots and pans clattered (but thankfully didn’t fall) as he yelped in surprise and sprang a meter back.

“Chloé,” he breathed, eyes wide. He dropped his shoulders and pushed a hand back through his hair. “You scared the crap out of me.”

“I could say the same to you,” she said. “I thought there was a robber in the apartment or something. What are you doing up?”

He shrugged, going back to the cabinet to pull the cookie sheets out, this time not attempting to avoid the loud noises that came with. “Couldn’t sleep.”

She glanced around the kitchen, spotting various ingredients—flour, brown sugar, dark chocolate chips, etc.—littering the counter, and a mixing bowl that appeared to have a large mound of cookie dough inside of it. “So you decided to make cookies at 1 in the morning?” She crossed the kitchen to sit on the counter in between him and the oven, placing herself in the perfect position to pick at the open bag of chocolate chips.

He didn’t spare her so much as a glance, focused on scooping out spoonfuls of cookie dough and placing them on the baking sheet. “Sorry,” he mumbled. She munched on a chocolate chip as she observed him. His face was still screwed up in that pained scowl that he had been wearing before she’d gone to bed.

She frowned and reached out, poking his cheek with her index finger.

His movements paused and he blinked, expression changing to one of surprise. She decided she liked it a lot better than the scowl. He side eyed her, eyebrows raised in silent question.

“You were frowning,” she said simply, not moving her finger from his cheek as she popped another chocolate chip into her mouth. “What’s going on?”

Nathaniel pursed his lips as he held eye contact with her. He breathed in a deep breath, finally closing his eyes in defeat as he let it out slowly. Then he went back to scooping out dough and she dropped her hand, satisfied with the passive expression on his face. “I bake when I’m stressed out,” he admitted. “Sorry for waking you.”

She hummed as she munched on a chocolate chip. “Will there be enough cookies for me when you’re done?”

“Plenty.”

“Forgiven,” she shrugged. She merely watched as he continued his work, and frowned when she realized that his face was slowly pursing up again. This time she took a chocolate chip and pressed it against his mouth. The action gave him pause again just like the poke had. He willingly opened his mouth, accepting the chocolate chip, but looked at her with a crease in his brow. “You were frowning again. You’ll get wrinkles that way.” She pressed her thumb between his eyebrows, smoothing away the crease. “You’ll get them doing that too. Stop it.”

He rolled his eyes and went back to the cookies, reaching the end of the dough now. She dropped her hand back to her lap. “You sound like my mother.”

“Which one?”

“Lorraine.”

“The school teacher?” He nodded. She had never met his mothers, but he talked about them enough that she’d gotten a pretty good idea of what they were like. From what she knew, Lorraine was observant, intuitive, and very very warm, making her great at her job as a kindergarten teacher. She decided the comparison was a compliment. “Well then thank you.”

He chuckled lightly, and she took pride in having coaxed even such a small smile out of the stress ball of a human. “Now you sound like Abigail.” Being compared to his journalist mother, on the other hand, could be a compliment or an insult. The woman was said to be insanely sharp, witty, and just as caring as her wife, but also mischievous, dangerously inquisitive, and occasionally immature.

“In a good way?” she asked.

He hummed in thought, taking the baking sheets and walking around her to set them in the oven. “In a sassy way,” he eventually decided, setting the timer for eight minutes.

“In a good way,” she asserted, and she watched him with a playful smile as he crossed back in front of her. He glanced at her, a tiny smile threatening at his lips, and broke into light-hearted laughter upon seeing her expression. The sound warmed her heart.

He took the dough-coated spoon from the mixing bowl and held it up for her. “Want to lick the spoon?” She was about to say something about the risks of salmonella when he added, “There’s no egg in the recipe.”

She smiled and took it, giving his hand a small squeeze in the process. “Thanks.”

“Jokes on you,” he said, “I get the bowl.” Then he swiped a finger along the inside of the mixing bowl and brought it to his mouth before turning to start clean up. She chuckled and took a taste from the spoon.

…

_Holy shit._

“Oh my goodness,” she groaned, savoring the flavors melting over her tongue in that moment. “I’m a lot more okay with being woken at 1 am if it means eating this cookie dough. Screw the cookies; just give me a bowl of this dough next time.”

Nathaniel laughed as he licked some more dough off his fingers. “I’ll remember that.” She stuck the spoon in her mouth to get everything that was left on it—seriously, what’d he put in there, crack cocaine??—and stared at the redhead. At the very least, he wasn’t scowling anymore—there were no lines to wrinkle that pretty face of his. But he still definitely looked gloomy. She was trying to think of anything she could possibly say to help—answer: nothing—when he spoke again, eyes trained on the bowl. “Thank you, by the way. For making me move in here.”

She pursed her lips. “Well when you say it like that it sounds like I forced you to come here.”

He looked up at her then, worry clear on his face. “No, that’s not—,” then he saw her playful smile. He sighed and rolled his eyes. “I mean it, bitch. It means a lot to have you looking out for me like this.” She giggled at the bitch comment, liking the way he seemed to be getting closer to his usual demeanor.

“It’s no problem, Nath. I never have visitors, so the empty room was going to waste anyway.”

“I’ll pay you rent as soon as I’m—,” she raised her hand to cut him off.

“No. You already know I have enough money.”

He frowned at her. “Chloé…”

“Nathaniel Kurtzberg, listen to me. You are an artist—a brilliant artist.” His eyes shifted off to the side, and she gently took his chin with a finger and thumb, guiding his attention back to her. “No. Listen to me. I know the art isn’t coming to you right now, and I know you’re frustrated, but you are still an artist. You just need time for it to come back to you. And for that, you need to have less things to worry about, including paying rent.” He opened his mouth to object, so she spoke before he could. “Nath, I have enough money to support the two of us, seven more friends, all their kids, grandkids, and eighteen pets. At least. Right now, you are a struggling artist.” She softened her gaze and let go of his chin, glad to see he didn’t break eye contact as she did. “Let me take care of your living expenses right now. You just focus on getting your life’s blood back.”

Neither of them so much as flinched as the timer went off. Finally, Nathaniel sighed, and slipped on the oven mitts. “You know, it is so strange how you can remind me so much of the Chloé you were in school and simultaneously be nothing like her.” The kitchen was filled with a sweet, almost seductive aroma as he pulled the cookies out of the oven.

“What do you mean?”

His lips curled into the smallest of smiles. “I mean you’re every bit of a force to be reckoned with as you were back then—and just as much of a bitch,” he added with a snarky side eye, “—but somehow…a really nice and caring person.” He shrugged, staring at the cookies as they cooled. “I guess you probably always were; I just had you wrong.”

She stared at him and just smiled, leaning back against the cabinets by her head. Hearing him say all of that was oddly validating—she had been working toward being a better person ever since she received the miraculous. It warmed her heart to hear it coming from him of all people—one of the people who had hated her the most in the past.

After a few minutes had passed, Nathaniel got out a plate and a spatula to scoop the cookies off the baking sheet. The very first one, however, he handed to her.

“Be careful, it’s probably hot in the middle.” The cookie looked like any other sitting in her hand, warming her palm and getting tiny smudges of melted chocolate on her fingers. But just like the dough, the taste was nothing short of heaven. She sighed her content and leaned back with her eyes closed.

“Okay seriously,” she said, “you have _got_ to tell me what is in these. They’re almost as good as Monsieur Dupain’s!”

He chuckled. “High praise, but I’m afraid it’s a family secret.”

She sighed dramatically. “I guess your mothers will just have to adopt me as their daughter then.” She peaked an eye open to see him laughing at that, the smile actually reaching his eyes this time. She closed her eyes again and smiled, content with having done that. Then she yawned, her tired muscles reminding her of the time. “Okay, I’m going back to bed now. Be sure to leave at least three cookies for me to eat tomorrow.” With that, she hopped down from the counter and started back to her room.

“Chloé?” She turned back right as she was about to round the corner down the hall. She was warmed to see that the redhead’s expression still had traces of a smile on it, even if he still looked exhausted and run down overall. “Thank you.”

She smiled. “Goodnight, Nath.”


End file.
